Expands Customer Insights With Weather, Social Media Data and New Visualizations

SAN FRANCISCO, CA--(Marketwire - Oct 22, 2012) - PivotLink, the leading provider of retail performance management solutions delivered via Software as a Service (SaaS), today announced the availability of PivotLink RetailMETRIX™ 2.0, a collection of best practice dashboards, reports and key performance indicators to improve store and sales performance.

Merchandising and marketing professionals use RetailMETRIX to understand external factors that drive store and sales performance. Instead of limiting analysis to purchases and other transactional data, they can combine operational and customer data sources with Cloud-based data available through the PivotLink DataCLOUD™ service, such as weather, brand sentiment, real-time in-store customer satisfaction data and product reviews. Unlike costly and complex data sourcing initiatives, PivotLink clients simply choose from a list of DataCLOUD options which are integrated with data in the PivotLink AnalyticsCLOUD™, the analytic platform for RetailMETRIX and other PivotLink applications. PivotLink's solutions arm decision makers company-wide with actionable insights to enhance customer satisfaction, increase competitive advantage and drive higher sales.

Only 34 percent of retail companies are satisfied with the process they currently use to create analytics, according to the Ventana Research "Benchmark Research: Business Analytics in Retail."[1] In a blog post, VP and research director Tony Cosentino adds, "While in the past retailers did not need to be on the cutting edge of analytics, dramatic changes occurring in retail are driving a new analytics imperative."[2]

"Companies that are striving to put customers at the center of decision making need to look beyond inventory levels, margin and sales data," said Joe Dalton, chief marketing officer, PivotLink. "PivotLink allows business experts to incorporate true customer-facing data in order to understand how variables like weather affect consumer purchasing patterns, which brands are trending in popularity on social media platforms, and how marketing campaigns are performing. This level of insight reveals new opportunities to improve performance and create more effective and lasting relationships with customers."

Highlights of RetailMETRIX 2.0:

New and enhanced data visualizations: RetailMETRIX improves insights across data sources with the addition of new charting visualizations, such as bubble charts and linear and exponential trendline overlays. In addition, RetailMETRIX includes user interface enhancements such as contextual report field descriptions and a new mapping visualization with multi-platform native support for mobile devices.

Expanded PivotLink DataCLOUD feeds:

Weather data and associated metrics improve insight into store sales performance and inventory levels by helping decision makers understand how weather conditions and patterns impact consumer demand and store traffic. For example, a large sporting goods retailer seeing higher year-over-year sales for ski equipment in January for a store in the Rockies may be able to link that to a decrease in average temperature or higher than average snowfall.

Social intelligence data from PivotLink DataCLOUD partners helps business users understand customer conversations on social media about brand sentiment, product reviews and more.

On-location customer feedback and store satisfaction data.

Demographic, lifestyle and spend profile data for over 140 million U.S. households can be appended to existing records for a more complete understanding of customers.

Fine-grained customer segmentation: Optimize marketing campaign performance with integration between RetailMETRIX and PivotLink's Customer PerformanceMETRIX™ application. Customer segments defined in Customer PerformanceMETRIX can be integrated with leading marketing automation systems, and campaign results from these systems can be analyzed in RetailMETRIX, where they can be integrated with other data sources for comprehensive performance analysis.

PivotLink is a trademark of PivotLink Corporation. Other product and company names may be the trademarks of their respective owners. This press release is for informational purposes only and no offer to buy or solicitation of an offer to sell any securities is made hereby. The forward-looking statements in this release are subject to unknown risks and uncertainties and do not constitute guarantees of future performance. Actual results, performance or achievements of the company may differ materially from results, performance or achievements of the company expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements.